Tag: Snowcastle Games

Well where to begin with this game I absolutely love it, Yes the story is a bit cheesy even cliché but the artwork, the gameplay, the battle system I love it all! It’s what final fantasy needs to get back to so let’s begin.

The story starts off with you controlling Ive a top military leader, she is top in all her classes but is not allowed to go on the field because her father said, so she steals papers and goes anyway. After that you turn to Armon and his uncle who is a half man half hammerhead shark…yeah I know like something out of The Flash!

This game has it all in my opinion. Good story, cool backdrops, towns, and dungeons a very good battle system and fully customisable players that you find along the way. There is also some puzzle solving bits which aren’t too taxing but you will encounter these a lot in pretty much every dungeon you go into so be prepared.

The gameplay is very easy you go into a town interact with NCP find out information and carry on with the quest when you leave that said town/dungeon you enter a surprisingly large open world which if full of different types of monsters that you can battle to level up your party.

Along the way, you will find hidden boss battles hidden towns/dungeons etc. and work your way through them. As you are going along I did find that when I went off the story I got totally owned by some ridiculously strong monsters that just straight up destroyed my existence but that’s just the fun of the game making your party stronger and trying to find hidden items.

As I said it’s a lot like FFVII in the layout of the game, just very polished compared to it.

You can have a max party of 6 characters when you finally meet everyone but only 4 can battle but what they have done is made it a little different by not having limit breaks as such but a buddy bond so you have to pair off your players and they work off of each other when they take/deal damage which builds up their meter and then only one of them can use it but over time your bond grows and so does your meter so it means when you get to a five star bond. You can use the special attack five times and you can split it between the pair which is a great idea because to add on to that as the pair grow a bond they unlock certain power-ups as well and these all vary to who is whose partner so it makes you swap your team all the time and not just leveling up and sticking with the same team all the time because we all know how that can end thanks to FFVII as well.

Another thing they have done is that every character you get is really and truly customised to how you want to play the game if you just want to focus on hit points just use the might tiles same for magic defense and all the other bits as well but it gets better as if you aren’t very keen on what you have done with your player you can swap out the tiles at any point for another one which is great because I can’t be the only one who made a wrong choice when leveling up my player and just wished there was a way to turn back time and just do it again well now you can.

The visuals in the game work well for what it is, it reminded me a lot of FFVIIII it’s kind of comic/cartoony but that takes nothing away from the game at all.

All of the towns are very well presented and all look different and unique and for the open landscape traveling all looks great a bit empty at time but it’s filled with a good variety of different monsters and hidden locations to find so it didn’t bother me at all going through every little bit of the land to find something that I may have missed.

The battles in the game are very cool and very frantic you could run into a horde of 10+ enemies and that is just what you don’t want but it adds to the excitement of the game, the boss battles in the game are always tough maybe I didn’t level up enough but I always had to be clever with every move whether to heal or attack and I enjoyed that a lot.

The only thing I can say that was bad about earthlock is that the camera angle when in a town/dungeon or in a fight with a lot of monsters it’s hard to see who you are attacking which is annoying as a few times I went with a magic attack and ended up healing a monster when I was trying to hit the one next to him, you can move the angle to look at the fight but then I found it just as hard to select the monster I wanted to attack as I got stuck just moving along my team of players but that is the only bad bit in my opinion.

The controls in earthlock are simple to move turn the camera we all know how to do that it’s the joysticks not hard at all you want to talk to an NCP press A, you want the menu press Y all basic stuff this all changes. When you get into a battle as you would be accustomed to a turn based style game, you would choose your move then confirm who you want hit then confirm again this is not the case every button in a battle is an attack you push that button and then select your target and then press it again it was a little bit confusing at first but after a few battles you get the hang of it and it won’t bother you at all

The music in the game is nice pleasant and calming, every town has their own little jingle that you can hear as well as the different landscapes backgrounds.

The music gets a bit more frantic when in a battle even more so in a boss battle I did find myself turning it down rather low as it was really loud in my opinion but that’s just me